Restaurant Daily Sales Report: Everything You Need to Know

You’ve heard that knowing your numbers is a bigger part of running a profitable restaurant, but what does that really mean? One of the biggest parts of knowing your numbers is knowing what you sell and when. Your restaurant daily sales report is what lets you do that.

What is a Daily Sales Report?

A daily sales report is a report of all of the money you took in during the day. It breaks your revenue down into different categories to help you understand what’s selling, and it also tells you how you were paid (cash, credit, etc.) to help you reconcile your bank statements.

Why is a Daily Sales Report Important?

A daily sales report provides three key benefits to your restaurant.

Keep up with accounting: Your daily sales report makes it easy to keep up with your accounting as you go. No more scrambling at the end of the month, quarter, or year to figure out where everything in your bank statements came from or having to fill in gaps when you can’t find the right documents.
Be able to compare periods and identify trends: You can collect your daily sales reports and group them together. For example, you might want to compare your sales on Mondays versus Fridays. Or, you might want to see if your sales this July are more than July of last year.
Match cash deposits to sales: Your daily sales report allows you to easily figure out how much cash you should have in the bank. If you had $5,000 in cash sales but only deposited $4,800, you know you have a problem.

What to Include in Your Daily Sales Report

Your daily sales report should include the money you made, how you got it, and a summary of the key information. How you build it will depend on what kind of restaurant you run and what your tracking goals are. For example, a restaurant and bar might want to separate food and drink sales, while a pizzeria might want to separate dine-in, takeout, and delivery orders. Follow the general layout below and adjust the individual line items as needed.

Revenue

The revenue section includes all of the different ways you make money.

Food sales: Food sales is the most basic and obvious, and will usually make up the biggest portion of your sales. You typically don’t break up food sales by menu item on a daily sales report, but you may want to split this into two or three categories (e.g., lunch/dinner, dine-in/takeout, etc.) if there are large differences in how you run those categories.
Alcohol/beverage sales: Restaurants that only offer fountain drinks might not break this out from food. A coffee shop or bar might have more sales here than in food.
Retail sales: Do you have a store or sell souvenirs? Include those sales here.
Gift certificates sold: Track gift certificates when you sell them to match when you receive the money.
Taxes collected: Even though these aren’t sales, tracking that you received the money will help you reconcile your deposits.
Delivery charges: Include delivery charges or other fees that go to the restaurant as a separate item to show where you’re making your money.
Tips/service charges: As with taxes, even if you’re paying the money to your staff, you want to track it to help reconcile what you received and paid.

Offsets to Revenue

Offsets to revenue are discounts and other items that customers used to pay in lieu of money.

Discounts/coupons: If you offer specials, enter the sales at full price and track the discount separately. This will help you better match your food costs and understand if your promotions are working.
Comped items: Give something to an upset customer or valued regular? Again, enter the full sale and offset it here to keep track of everything.
Gift cards used: Redeemed gift cards come out of revenue because you want to track when you sold the food, but you already tracked that you received the money when you sold the gift card.

Payments Received

To help track the money you received, enter it all separately.

Each credit card type as a separate line: If you get separate deposits from Amex, Mastercard, and Visa, enter them separately to make it easier to match them up later.
Cash: Cash gets its own line item to match up to your deposits.
Alternative payment methods: If you use any phone apps, cryptocurrency, or other alternate payments, include them as well.

Totals

Your last set is to add everything up.

Total receipts: This is your revenues minus any revenue offsets.
Less non-cash payment methods: Next, subtract out any credit card payments or other payments that you’ll receive via electronic bank deposit.
Less cash deposit: Third, subtract your cash deposit from that day.
Cash shortfall: The remainder should be $0. If not, you may have undeposited funds, a cash handling error, or theft you need to investigate.

How to Create Your Report

There are a lot of pieces to the report, but it’s a quick and easy process if you set it up properly. Most of the inputs come in automatically if you’re using a good POS system and make sure your staff enters orders in a timely and accurate fashion. The real key is getting your categories and line items to match what you’re trying to learn about your business.

An accountant at Founders CPA can help you understand where your current sales are coming from and where improved information might help you make smarter business decisions. We’ll then create a daily sales report that’s customized to your restaurant and link it up to your POS and accounting systems. To learn more or to get started, contact us to schedule a consultation.